The ramblings of Allan and Alana Goodall, a transplanted Scottish Canadian and his Southern wife, trapped in the cultural hinterland that is northern Louisiana.

Monday, April 17, 2006

Disturbing blog

This is disturbing.

A young girl was found dead in Oklahoma in a plastic tub in the apartment of Kevin Ray Underwood, a neighbor in her apartment building. He apparently admitted to killing the girl. The news says he intended to carve up her body and eat her.

She disappeared on Wednesday, April 12. Underwood made a blog entry, the first in about 3 weeks, on the 13th, a day after he killed her.

In the blog he talks about depression. Apparently an entry states how his fantasies were getting weirder, and that he was talking about cannibalism.

I didn't read much of the blog, though a few things struck me. He was a loner with social problems. To do what he did, he obviously had mental problems. One of his posts alludes to being abused as a child.

What was really scary is his list of interests. These are scary because they are pretty common among science fiction fans and gamers. One of his favourite groups was Pink Floyd. In an early blog he says he wished he knew people so that he could play a game of Dungeons and Dragons. Among his favourite movies were some of my favourite movies or movies I own: Fight Club, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Full Metal Jacket, Airplane, The Nightmare Before Christmas. He liked reading about history, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Microserfs.

In an entry in June, 2003, he wrote of a particularly vivid nightmare with a connection to the works of H.P. Lovecraft. As anyone who reads this blog knows, our roelplaying group regularly plays games set in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.

Except for the horrible act he committed and his inability to control his dark fantasies, he was a fairly typical science fiction geek, outwardly like hundreds of people I've met at game and science fiction conventions.

I truly hope that someone with an agenda doesn't go combing through his blog for things to pin his mental state on. It wouldn't surprise me if we see new screeds against roleplaying games and science fiction fandom as a result. There are lots of comments on the blog, almost all of them entered in the last few hours. You can already see some nutcases blaming everyone from feminists to a lack of religion in society for this guy's monstrous personality.

I wonder what some people might think about the things I post on this blog...

No backlash so far. News of the guy's blog focused on his mental state, but didn't dig into some of the nerdy stuff he was into. Even the fact that the blog existed passed through the news cycle very quickly.